Sierra Division Presents Three Epic Projects Built With NVIDIA Omniverse

Sierra Division Presents Three Epic Projects Built With NVIDIA Omniverse

Gerardo Delgado July 26, 2023

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Outsourcing studio co-founder Jacob Norris reveals photorealistic scenes built with 3D apps and Omniverse USD Composer this week In the NVIDIA Studio.'

Editor's note: This post is part of the weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology improves creative workflows. We're also deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.

Jacob Norris is a 3D artist and the president, co-founder and creative director of Sierra Division Studios - an outsource studio specializing in digital 3D content creation. The studio was founded with a single goal in mind: to make groundbreaking artwork at the highest level.

His team is entirely remote - giving employees added flexibility to work from anywhere in the world while increasing the pool of prospective artists who have a vast array of experiences and skill sets that the studio can draw from.

Norris envisions a future where incredible 3D content can be made regardless of location, time or even language, he said. It's a future in which NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting and building custom 3D tools and metaverse applications, will play a critical role.

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Omniverse is also a powerful tool for making SimReady assets - 3D objects with accurate physical properties. Combined with synthetic data, these assets can help solve real-world problems in simulation, including for AI-powered 3D artists. Learn more about AI and access creative resources to level up your passion projects on the NVIDIA Studio creative side hustle page.

Plus, check out the new community challenge, #StartToFinish. Use the hashtag to submit a screenshot of a favorite project featuring both its beginning and ending stages for a chance to be showcased on the @NVIDIAStudio and @NVIDIAOmniverse social channels.

Welcome to our new #StartToFinish challenge.

Join by show us a photo/video of how one of your art projects started and then one of the final result + tag #StartToFinish.

Check out these great examples from @rafianimates made with #OpenUSD in @NVIDIAOmniverse. pic.twitter.com/z9v656oQ2Q

NVIDIA Studio (@NVIDIAStudio) July 10, 2023

Tapping Omniverse for Omnipresent Work Omniverse is an incredibly powerful tool for our team in the collaboration process, said Norris. He noted that the Universal Scene Description format, aka OpenUSD, is key to achieving efficient content creation.

We used OpenUSD to build a massive library of all the assets from our team, Norris said. We accomplished this by adding every mesh and element of a single model into a large, easily viewable overview scene for kitbashing, which is the process of combining elements from several assets into an entirely new model.

The byproduct of kitbashing.

Since everything is shared in OpenUSD, our asset library is easily accessible and reduces the time needed to access materials and make edits on the fly, Norris added. This helps spur inspirational and imaginational forces.

During the review phase, the team can compare photorealistic models with incredible visual fidelity side by side in a shared space, ensuring the models are created to the highest set of standards, said Norris.

July 20, 2023Universal Scene Description Support for Marvelous Designer Lets Users Tailor Digital Assets, Clothes for 3D CharactersNew Omniverse Connector for the 3D software enables creators to fashion digital

July 5, 2023Into the Omniverse: Adobe Substance 3D, NVIDIA Omniverse Enhance Creative Freedom Within 3D WorkflowsCreators across disciplines are harnessing multi-app, OpenUSD workflows to push the limits

The Last Oil Rig on Earth Sierra Division's The Oil Rig video is set on Earth's last operational fossil fuel rig, which is visited by a playful drone named Quark. The piece's storytelling takes the audience through an impeccably detailed environment.

Real or rendered?

A scene as complex as the one above required blockouts in Unreal Engine. The team snapped models together from a set of greybox modular pieces, ensuring the environment bits were easy to work with. Once satisfied with the environment concept and layout, the team added further detail to the models.

Building blocks in Unreal Engine.

Norris' Lenovo ThinkPad P73 NVIDIA Studio laptop with NVIDIA RTX A5000 graphics powered NVIDIA DLSS technology to increase the interactivity of the viewport - by using AI to upscale frames rendered at lower resolution while retaining high-fidelity detail.

Sierra Division then created tiling textures, trim sheets and materials to apply to near-finalized models. The studio used Adobe Substance 3D Painter to design custom textures with edge wear and grunge, taking advantage of RTX-accelerated light and ambient occlusion for baking and optimizing assets in seconds.

Oil rig ocean materials refined in Adobe Substance 3D Painter and Designer.

Next, lighting scenarios were tested in the Omniverse USD Composer app with the Unreal Engine Connector, which eliminates the need to upload, download and refile formats, thanks to OpenUSD.

Stunning detail.

With OpenUSD, it's very easy to open the same file you're viewing in the engine and quickly make edits without having to re-import, said Norris.

Team-wide review of renders

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